I have had a few family members pass away but I was never there for it. Obviously, the death of a loved one creates an emotional load that needs to be processed. Recently, I was present for the final few days of someone in the family and it was an entirely different experience. It is interesting the way that each individual deals with facing the death of a loved one happening in front of them, like a super slow motion car crash, and by extension confronting their own mortality.
The Curse of the Weeping Woman (dir. Michael Chaves) is another film in the Conjouring Horror universe, and attempts to explore the idea of the corrosive effect of not dealing with your emotional wounds. Anna Garcia (Linda Cardellini) is a social worker and mother of two, who has lost her police officer husband. The trouble is I couldn’t tell you how recently or how he passed away, it felt like the film was saying that this detail was important but never expanded upon it.
The trouble of home life has caused her work life to slip and she is taken off a case that means a lot to her. With an impassioned plea, she gets back on the case and goes to see a woman whose children are missing. The children turn out not to be missing but locked in a wardrobe. The mother of the children, Patricia (Patricia Velasquez), appears to be a very troubled woman.
Anna takes the children off Patricia but promises to keep them safe. That night we get the first appearance of the eponymous Weeping Woman; a creepy and sinister apparition, who beguiles the children and drowns them. This sets up the Weeping Woman to come after Anna’s two children.
The beginning of the film was genuinely interesting and set up the potential for an engrossing story that never paid off. All of the characters had some sort of unresolved issue, but these issues never got addressed or dealt with. There was a lot of opportunity for creating compelling character arcs with the characters understanding how their grief was hurting those that they cared about, but this was never touched on.
Due to this lack of development, the initial scares in the audience shifted to laughter when the eventual showdown between the Weeping Woman and Anna finally happened. Linda Cardellini was magnetic in the role and conveyed strength, fear, and concerned in equal parts, but her character never had any revelation, never addressed the initial set up of her dead husband, never felt like she grew so that growth allowed to her to win over the Weeping Woman.
Rafael (Raymond Cruz) was stealing every scene as the mystic who had turned his back on the formal church teachings and brought a sense of levity to the sometimes drawn out creepier scenes. Even then, his input didn’t create a revelation about the Weeping Woman’s weakness or goal.
In the end, there was no cathartic moment of revelation, no “oh I should have seen that coming” moment. It just kept thinking about the saying: Hurt people, hurt people, as all the people had something they needed to deal with to grow, which the film never addressed. Ultimately, It was a very interesting set up that failed to live up to the promise of the premise.
May 2019
By Luke McMeeken-Ruscoe